IN one of his famous stings directed at Mr. Forbes Burnham’s PNC swing to doctrinaire Marxist- Leninist socialism in the mid 1970s, the transplanted Buxtonian mocked him for the change of direction. “It takes socialists to build socialism”, Mr. Kwayana gleefully crooned in a jig. So what was the lesson? In his weekly SN column of 8-12-12 titled ‘dynamic considerations that should drive sugar reform”, Dr Clive Thomas is unaware how suspect, rejected and embarrassing he has become. Stealthily and innocently he lends “buildup” advice how the “framing (and) the reform of GUYSUCO and the sugar industry must necessarily start with an identification of the major dynamics driving both”. So to be helpful, the crafty political academic goes on a cruising get down “drive” by identifying “the five most important of these”. Now airborne, Dr Thomas suddenly changes course midair presumptuously expecting Guyanese to “take for granted that, after this series of (SN) columns, readers would already appreciate the transcending roles of sugar and GUYSUCO’s in the wider Guyanese economy, society and polity.” Without any practical experience in even selling fried plantains at the street corner, Dr Thomas has pre-meditatively laid the foundation crafting it slowly week after week. He has used his SN columns as lethal injections for the terminal sedative euthanasia of the sugar industry. In effect, Dr Thomas finds the sugar industry with a “terminal” disease and he wants to kindly give it a painless death. If Dr Thomas believes he will get away with such a felonious, incriminating “remedy” he is most assuredly wrong. He would only succeed in igniting the perfect political storm unless the PPP/C fails to come to its senses in accommodating respected Speaker Mr. Ralph Ramkarran.
What gives Dr Thomas any validating authority to terminate sugar just because he says “the most obvious dynamic is that GUYSUCO manifests all frailties facing a firm in a mature industry that is in a terminal phase?” Dr Thomas could not even save Dr Rodney from being killed, now he believes he is now equipped to make sugar even bitter? Check to see what Mr. Kwayana implies in application to Dr Thomas’s inabilities. At least Mr. Kwayana sold many bunches of fat green plantains when he headed the Guyana Marketing Corporation.

So eager was the WPA to destroy the PNC at that time that (even Mr. Kwayana with his entire half a century of touted ‘saintly’ political experiences) found themselves unable to readjust to Guyana’s political realities and prevent Dr Walter Rodney’s unnecessary assassination.
 Dr Clive Thomas survived and has now become publicly and proudly identified with awakening and introducing tribal African culture among his black countrymen. As a leader within the African Cultural Development Association (ACDA), they are pledged to also achieving political power. They want to bring down Babylon (the West.) Same Dr Thomas who was the WPA presidential candidate before the 1992 elections and refused Dr Jagan’s offer to become Guyana’s PPP/C Prime Minister. Now the media activist of the skeleton WPA has become “born again” (like Mayor Hamilton Green) and is poised within to A-P-N-U and me unashamedly. If fishes can swim at sea and coconuts can grow on a tree, who can be surprised to find them simmering in the same APNU coal pot agitating for “equally” shared government rice from the PPP/C?

It is has become very obvious that Dr Thomas and the new WPA are the new Trojan horses for the PNC’s leader Mr. David Granger’s plans to privatise and/or shut down sugar industry, exactly as the black-based PNM accomplished in Trinidad. Dr Thomas behaves like a textbook schoolboy unschooled in practical politics and needs be reminded he would be plunging all Guyanese over Kaieteur Falls. The PNC of which he is now proudly associated shut down the railways only to drown Guyana in a transportation dilemma from which it has never recovered. Now sugar again is threatened with a calamitous termination by the PNC and Dr Thomas champions all their penny wise, pound foolish history.
All his life-long academic experiences have only served to reinforce conditioned, bookish solutions removed from everyday life. Lecturing about economics does not make one an expert to advocate on black culture. Neither does it make him an expert on business. Admittedly, the political activist and academic does not have to show any correlation between all three. Absolutely nothing! But while in all fairness that Dr Thomas has never claimed to be an expert about continental black culture, he still has every right to his privileged interests. Same constitutional rights to which Guyana’s Home Affairs Minister is entitled, but who is “privileged to be bound and gagged” because of “failure” to directly order policemen to shoot rioters and robbers. But then Dr Thomas has never even sold fried plantains on the streets or displayed political wisdom in preventing the demise of the legendary Dr Rodney either. In retrospect, Dr Jagan’s offer to make him-thank God was refused – the PPP/C Prime Minister would have been more tragic. What experiences has he acquired to run the economic affairs of an entire nation much less pronouncing the demise of sugar?